Event Details

Last summer, several dozen Drupal developers and other motivated individuals got together in Madison, Wisconsin for the first Midwest Drupal Developer Summit, an event designed to help accelerate the development of Drupal 8. A year later, a lot of progress has been made, but there’s still a lot of work left to do before Drupal 8 is ready for release.

This year’s Midwest Drupal Summit (MWDS) will be held August 15-17 from 9-5pm at Palantir’s offices on Chicago’s North Side and will consist exclusively of well-organized sprints focused on breaking down remaining release blockers and helping to ensure that Drupal 8 is the best and most polished version of Drupal yet. Refreshments and lunch will be served all three days.

Unlike a traditional DrupalCamp, MWDS will not have any regular sessions, just focused working groups organized around specific topics. All attendees will be asked in advance to commit to a specific sprint as part of the registration process. Attendees will be able to participate in multiple sprints at the event itself, and additional sprints may be announced as the event draws closer.

D8 Launch Content for Drupal.org SprintThis sprint will help develop content and other material to help promote the Drupal 8 launch. Led by Content Working Group chair, George DeMet, it is a great opportunity for non-code contributions to D8.

New Contributor SprintThis sprint is your chance to get started with in-person training and mentoring from friendly, experienced core contributors xjm, YesCT and disasm. If you've already started to work on core, come meet other contributors, hang out in person, and work on manageable tasks in the Drupal core queue. The goal is to help anyone with site building experience help with core.

Twig/Theming SprintThe big picture isn't really about Twig anymore, it's more about "Improving the theme layer in Drupal 8" and we've still got a lot of work to do. Join Jen Lampton and John Albin Wilkins in a sprint to tackle that work, which involves converting theme functions to Twig templates, and to a larger extent theme system cleanup. This work also includes a refactoring of the underlying architecture consolidation of similar templates, and generally making things make more sense.

WSCCI SprintThe Web Services Initiative (WSCCI) needs to solidify the deep changes made to Drupal 8. Expect a group led by Larry Garfield (Crell) working on completing outstanding page callback conversions and another on performance optimization and tuning of Drupal's critical path code.

Multilingual SprintThe Multilingual Initiative has several focus issues to sprint on, and will have novice issues too for folks just starting with d8mi. YesCT will be there to help people identify issues they are interested in. We will be working on any remaining criticals impacting APIs, final push on config_translation, and getting localize.drupal.orgready for Drupal 8 strings.

#D8CX: Upgrade contributed modules to Drupal 8Drupal 8 has entered its Polish Phase, which means that Drupal core APIs are becoming more stable and we'll soon release the first Drupal 8 beta. Now is the time to start porting contributed modules to Drupal 8. This event is BYOM (bring your own module)--start the upgrade of a contributed module you maintain, or help out with a module that's important for your usecase. Top Drupal 8 contributors xjm and effulgentsia will help you get started.

Drupal 8 technical debt: Help make Drupal 8 releasableDrupal 8 is pretty much the coolest release of Drupal ever, but there's also a lot of work left to do. Help reduce technical debt and get Drupal 8 on track for release by working on major and critical issues. We desperately need patches, patch reviews, automated tests, issue summaries, and more for these release-blockers. xjm will help you find a task, and if you get stuck on a hard problem, you'll already be in a room full of the brightest minds in Drupal!